The Chimes at Midnight
by stereolightning
Summary: Andromeda planned a quiet exit. Narcissa isn't having any of it.


_**A/N** Massive thanks are due to starfishstar for beta'ing this piece. Also, I've been reading her brilliant Andromeda-centric fics lately, and those inspired this one-shot._

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Andromeda wanted to say something to Sirius before she left, but he was preoccupied by a huge Irish wolfhound that their uncle had brought to the party. Sirius and Regulus were chasing the dog around the library, shouting and playing fetch. This might be the last time she ever saw them. However, she had made her choice, and all choices had costs.

The dark ballroom and richly carpeted corridors sparkled with the sequinned gowns and bejewelled hats of two hundred guests. Bellatrix was laughing madly, six gin-and-tonics in, a goblin-made tiara perched atop her coal-coloured curls and a surly-looking new fiancé on her arm. The party in honour of their engagement swelled and roiled with dancing cousins and chatty sycophants, like a tempestuous sea. A string quartet plucked their instruments under flickering torch light.

Andromeda slipped past her mother and father – they weren't speaking to one other, her parents, but they were putting on a convincing show to the contrary for the Minister for Magic – and ducked into the corridor that led to her childhood bedroom. Once inside, she threw on her black traveling cloak, which she had draped over the back of her desk chair. The neat stack of pillows on her bed had gone askew, and she straightened them with a twitch of her wand. There was hardly any point now, but it gave her a vague feeling of usefulness, of rightness.

She closed the door and made her way up a narrow flight of stairs that led to the rooftop observatory. Once she reached the door, she scanned the stairwell below – empty – and pulled back the silver doorknob.

The observatory, with its high, glass-panelled ceiling and beautiful brass telescopes, had long been Andromeda's favourite part of the house. The dark volumes in the library were full of awful opinions, and the portraits along the walls were dour and disapproving, but the observatory was impartial. Scientific. The stars and the open sky, nothing else. Andromeda opened a large window and warm, slightly damp night air drifted in. She checked her watch. She was ten minutes early. Ted was due to arrive at midnight.

She paced around the room, trailing her fingers along the astrolabes and lunascopes. She silently said goodbye to the room, the house, and the people she cared about below. Goodbye to her cousins, her parents, her sisters. She knew perfectly well that most of them would disown her the moment they found out where and why she had gone. Thanks to Bellatrix, the whole family knew that Andromeda had visited Diagon Alley with a Muggleborn boy on more than one occasion. She could have walked out the front door, but she didn't think she could stomach a dramatic farewell. Better to go quietly, with no tears and no parting words that might haunt them later. Better to do it while the family was otherwise occupied.

She had known it would not be easy, but it was even less easy now that she was actually here. Preparation and the thing itself were different beasts. Anticipation dug its cold claws into her neck.

The clack-clack of heeled shoes wrenched her gaze back to the door.

"I'm not stupid, you know," said Narcissa, shutting the door behind her delicately, so that the soft click could not be heard by the guests below.

Narcissa was sixteen and willowy, with twiggy legs stuffed into white dragon-hide boots. There was something doll-like about her – a passivity, a submission to expectation that made Andromeda both pity her and want to protect her more fiercely. Narcissa crossed her arms. Her milk-white face was blank, unreadable.

"I don't think that you are, Ciss," said Andromeda.

"Nobody brings a travelling cloak if they're just ducking outside for a fag. Especially not in summer," said Narcissa.

Andromeda said nothing. This was not the goodbye she had wanted.

"That's a pretty dress," said Narcissa. "Are you going to give that back to us when you leave, or are you going to keep it? Because I doubt you'll be wearing silk and feathers where you're going. Maybe you should have borrowed something from one of the house elves. That would be more appropriate."

Andromeda marshalled her words, willing them to sound clear and sensible. "Ciss, listen, let me explain – "

"No. You listen," said Narcissa, "because this is probably the last time I'll ever see you, so you just shut your mouth, Andy. You are ruining my life, do you know that? Who's going to want me when I've got a damned Mudblood for a brother-in-law, then? And who's going to take care of Mother when she finds out about this and takes to her bed again for weeks and weeks? Because Bella is already engaged, she's got one foot out the door, and I am going to be the one dealing with the consequences of your actions, Andy, for ever and ever. Me. Not you."

Narcissa exhaled sharply, reached into her sparkling silver robes, and took out a cigarette. She lit it with a practised hand and a nonverbal spell.

"Since when do you smoke?" asked Andromeda.

"Since when do you care more about a boy than about us? And a Hufflepuff, of all possible choices," said Narcissa, exhaling bluish smoke into a demure plume. "How much of our gold have you stolen, anyway?"

"I've taken nothing that wasn't mine to begin with," said Andromeda. She had watched the Gringotts goblins transfer the gold into her vault two days ago, and it had felt like treason. But that was nothing to how she felt now, with her heart so heavy it might have been transfigured to marble.

"Set yourself up with a nice dowry?"

"It's a lot less than what yours will be. And it's not illegal, Ciss. There was gold contingent upon my finishing my seventh year and returning home. And I have returned home."

"For three days," Narcissa said, with a strangled, derisive noise almost like a cough.

"Yes."

The acrid smoke reached Andromeda and stung her eyes.

"Look, you don't have to stay here, either," said Andromeda, blinking. "Make your own choices. Marry someone you actually like. Or don't marry anybody. I don't see why who we marry has to be so important, anyway. It's nobody else's business."

Narcissa toyed with a brass instrument for a moment, turning it this way and that.

"You're going to die poor and alone, you know that? He can't look after you. And the way things are going, he's likely to get himself killed anyway." She said it coldly, dispassionately.

Andromeda rounded on her sister, drawing her wand, slashing it through the air. The lit cigarette flew into the air and ricocheted off a window. Narcissa shook her hand wildly as if she had been burned.

"Don't you dare say that to me. Don't you ever, ever say that to me," said Andromeda.

Narcissa drew her wand and pointed it at her sister. They regarded one another, each possessed of the same quick, considered calculation that years in Slytherin had taught them. Finally, at the same moment, like tandem dancers, they lowered their wands. Narcissa fired up another cigarette and twirled it slowly between her fingers, daring her sister to comment on it.

"I'm staying. I am not going to abandon my family," said Narcissa, after several long moments. "For anything. Ever."

Narcissa crossed her arms again and leaned back on the narrow heels of her snow-white boots. Andromeda glanced out the window, at the stars, at the stars and constellations half the family were named after. Sirius. Cygnus. Orion. Her namesake was out there somewhere, a revolving cloud of dust and fire.

"I hate that this is how you're going to remember me," Andromeda said quietly. "I hate that you think I'm abandoning you. But someday you will love somebody enough that you're willing to break with expectation. Or I hope you will, anyway."

Andromeda turned. Narcissa pursed her lips as if her mouth had filled with lemon juice, but her eyes went soft and vulnerable. There she was, the little sister who, on Andromeda's first day of school, had chased the Hogwarts Express halfway down the platform, blonde plait streaming behind her, much to the consternation of their mother.

And now Andromeda understood. Narcissa had never intended to stop her. Nor had she come to hear Andromeda's reasons. She had simply wanted to see if Andromeda felt hesitation or grief, because either would prove that she still loved her, or had ever loved her. And of course she did. Narcissa might be haughty, mercurial, and wrong-headed, but she was her sister, too.

"Ciss – "

A tap at the window. Both sisters turned. Ted Tonks perched on his broomstick, his dark blue travelling cloak rippling like the flag of a far-flung, unknown country. As he dismounted and ducked through the open window, he caught sight of Narcissa. He waved at her in his guileless, unassuming way, and she stared at him, irresolute, unsure whether to treat him as someone beneath her notice or not.

"Ciss," said Andromeda, beckoning her sister closer.

Ted pressed a second broomstick into Andromeda's hand and kissed her gravely. Narcissa frowned and tossed her hair again.

"What," said Narcissa flatly, without emotion. She stood still and white and straight as a Doric column.

"Visit me. I'll write to you. I'll send you the address."

Narcissa stubbed out her cigarette by crushing it against a brass globe. "We both know that will never happen, Andy."

"Then come and say goodbye to me."

Narcissa shook her head and turned on her heel. "Go. I'll say you've gone to bed with a headache."

Before Andromeda could thank her for this small, peculiar mercy, Narcissa had swung open the door and disappeared behind it. Andromeda listened as the soft tapping of her shoes became quieter and quieter, finally becoming inaudible over the noise of the party. She blinked and her sister's outline flashed purple inside her eyelids, a ghostly afterimage.

This was not the goodbye Andromeda had wanted. But she had made her choice, and all choices had costs.

As Andromeda ducked through the open window and took off on her broom, the sounds of laughter and violins died away, replaced by the night air rushing past her ears, and the soft, reassuring voice of Ted humming a song she did not recognise. Water clung to her eyelashes, rendering the lights of Muggle towns indistinguishable from stars.


End file.
